Three more tales from the Diableries of Upper Brittany, in which the devil is outwitted, outworked, and outsailed. In The Women and the Devil, two short legends show why the women of Brittany are said to have more finesse than the men: a bride saves her bridegroom from his pact with a single hair of her head, and a farmer's wife rescues her husband from the servant he hired at the Saint-Pierre fair with a bottle of holy water. In The Sorcerer, a gentleman with a chest of books makes the mill of Launay grind with neither wind nor wave, and the book he carries — the Petit Albert — draws two further households into its magic: a rector's chambermaid is carried off in a breath of wind as she reads it, and a sick man's night watch is visited by gentlemen in red. In Jean-Jacques the Sailor, a captain ships a sailor who does the work of ten men by whistling, grows rich on three chests of gold-stones, and learns too late whom he has been sailing with.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
In The Sorcerer, the book tells in a single clause that the rector's chambermaid did not long survive her adventure; the clause is carried whole, exactly as the book gives it, and no completeness beyond the book's own telling is claimed for it.
The Women and the Devil stands in the book without a named teller. The Sorcerer was told by Vincente Béquet, of Saint-Pôtan, in 1867, and its second anecdote by Angèle Quérinan, of Andouillé. Jean-Jacques the Sailor was told by Rose Renaud, of Saint-Cast, in 1879.
Told in Upper Brittany, and collected by Paul Sébillot (1843–1918).
Chapters:
00:09 The Women and the Devil
06:31 The Sorcerer
12:04 Jean-Jacques the Sailor
From Paul Sébillot, Contes populaires de la Haute-Bretagne, Tome I (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1880), public domain; told in a fresh in-house rendering from the French.
Folk Tales of France is KacheliTV's telling of Paul Sébillot's Contes populaires de la Haute-Bretagne — the great nineteenth-century collection of the tales of Upper Brittany.
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